Theme Updater & Backups | OOTS , 272 reviews

I used this app for the first time. I was glad I made a backup of my site because I had to restore it. I had 7 backend pages that could not be updated. I used a comparison app to review the coding that was different and I spent 3 hours updating. I published the site. It did not work at all. I paid a significant amount for the theme and I am very disappointed with this Theme Updater and I will not be purchasing it. Disappointed with Out of the Sandbox for slow or no response.

Very poor service and underhand fees - simply read the reviews. The app doesn't work very well, and now a greedy developer wants to charge over $100 a year (forever) for an app to update a couple of lines of code. Their themes are full of bugs, support is very slow (at times even leaving bugs in the code - I'm looking at you 'Artisan'), and now they are trying to sneakily charge for something that was advertised as part of their theme purchase. I doubt this is acceptable practice, or legal, in most countries.

We have already had to change two Out of the Sandbox themes due to bugs in their software, and now they do this. If I were them, I would be very embarrassed as to how they treat long standing customers.

The most insulting thing is the email we were sent, spinning this charge as an 'opportunity'. Please don't patronize us with PR, you are simply milking merchants for all you can get before moving on.

P.S. Following the developers response: You seem to miss the point - everyone who purchases an Out of the Sandbox theme agreed to do so with the knowledge that the updating app comes along with it (and we have also paid an initial premium for the theme and updater app). You are significantly changing the agreement by now charging for the app, and I would say that is unlikely to be legal here in the EU. Also, you mentioned in one response that you need the money to fund your IT systems - well, if you can't afford to provide a service, don't offer it for free with the intention of locking customers into a 'blackmail scheme'. Have the dignity to admit you simply want more money by charging customers twice.

The app doesn't work if you have minimal customization on your page.
The company and its shady practices are even worse!

If I could give 0 stars I would! I have been managing this website for our company for over 2 years and I can't think of even one time that we've used this app. And now I come back from vacation to an email saying this week (because they only gave a weeks notice) the Free Basic Plan will now be charged $9 per month.

I've read many of the other reviews and the responses from OOTS -- they seem to not understand why we all are frustrated with this. Regardless if there's a way to update themes without the app -- there's only a handful of updates throughout the year, but yet you want to charge us PER MONTH for these handfuls of updates -- that I should add we've hardly ever if at all, used.

This subsidy website has been temporarily on back-burner -- it's most definitely not worth an additional $9 per month for practically nothing in return. I will be deleting this app -- this theme had too many conflicts with other apps we've tried to use and no solutions available anyways.

I used this app last week to upgrade the Turbo theme on my store. It worked, but it did not transfer much of the configuration or any of the tweaks to the original theme. I still had to spend a few hours re-configuring my stores homepage and collection and product configurations, so not sure if it actually helped or not.

Destroyed our theme twice in a row. Furthermore it places the wrong items in the cart via mobil (happen also twice). No real support, "because of custom design". Well, the custom design is just basic CSS so no real adjustments. That should be able to handle the update but it doesn't. Support is very nice and friendly, but useless. They've created a storetasker ticket for us, but there was no reply by anyone. Great looking themes but be aware of adjusting anything - not even the font (like in our case). (PRO PLAN)

This is a life-changing app that enables easy updating of a highly customised theme. If you've put in the work to update your theme version to an OS 2.0 version, this will make ongoing updates a breeze. Our experience has been incredible - we did not think it would work for us. There are a heap of negative reviews from store owners who would probably find value in utilising a third party to manage the development and ongoing maintenance of their store. But if you have a bit of a clue and keep your store and theme in good shape, this is probably a great solution for updating to the latest versions. Deserving of 5 stars.

We write very rarely reviews but in this case this app has been bothering us a lot. We have bought the first team from Out of the Sandbox many years ago. At that time we didn't need to pay for the theme updater app at all and it was a free of charge which I think is the minimum as themes from Out of the Sandbox are not cheap. But since last year they figured out they want to make more money by charging for this app but in the same time reducing the quality of service. In the past we always got feedback within 24 hours when there was an issue or they needed to resolve something. Now we need to be lucky to get feedback in 3 days and this is called priority service.

So for us conclusion is that if we want to buy more themes it will definetley not be an Out of the Sandbox theme.

We would even not mind to pay for the theme updater app as it is useful but what they charge is too much 14USD per month for priority support taking too long. And yes we do request it through the theme updater with the priority support and a general email. If you go outside of the priority support you should be happy to hear something in 1 week and sometimes even 2 weeks which is completely ridiculous

Update 14-07-2020 According to feedback of out of the sandbox the question has been answered. But this is not the case still waiting for an answer on some changes of the theme they made which changes the design of the header

I have received an email telling me that they intend to delete the free plan of this app, so think twice before to buy one of Out of the Sandbox theme: without the app you will have to start new every time they publish an update! I am utterly disappointed by their policy...

This app is a poison chalice... use it at your peril. In theory it is a great idea but it is poorly executed. When you update the theme you will also have to update your templates if you have made any customizations at all, quite a timely and complicated process so you will probably have to pay an expert to do it for you. However, you will not see if the update is any good until after you have paid the expert. We updated and were not able to use the update because of the number of bugs making our site look poor and unprofessional. You then have to wait for the next theme update to be released and then go through the same process of updating your templates and paying an expert all over again. The chances of there being any more bugs are high, if you look at the Out-of-the-Sandbox change logs they are littered with "bug fixes" for previous updates. It would appear that they are releasing the updates without doing the appropriate checks to make sure that they are robust.